Cocktails and Records

It’s usually quite quiet in the City of London on weekend afternoons. Sadly, it wasn’t quiet enough last Saturday afternoon.

I was running a bit late and rushing to a talk at the Barbican Arts Centre when I hit the usually very busy thoroughfare that is Moorgate. There wasn’t much traffic, but I dutifully stopped at the pedestrian crossing.

Behind me was a man with a pram and a 6 year old girl. ‘Why don’t you press the button?’ the father said cheerily to his daughter - the very moment my hand hit the metal. I turned to give her a ‘sorry’ kind of smile. She glared back. Clearly I had ruined her day.

So we stood there waiting at the lights. The traffic cleared, but the lights did not change. I had just decided to make a run for it when the old lady who had by now joined us commented ‘I think that it’s great that you’re teaching your family to cross the road properly.’

I grimace. Can’t she tell that these are not my children? Do I look like the sort of person who has children?  I try to ignore her and look at my watch to estimate just how late I could potentially be if I don’t cross the road now.

‘Yes’ she continues ‘It’s really great that you’re being such responsible parents.’

I kind of make a half hearted, embarrassed gesture and say that we’re not actually together. However, she doesn’t hear me and continues to rub the situation in: ‘We could easily cross now, but I suppose that we should lead by example and wait for the green man. How old is your daughter?’

Again, I try and unsuccessfully indicate that we’re not together. The father helps out by doing absolutely nothing other than smirking. His daughter continues to glare. I am glued to the pavement. The old lady looks at me a bit strangely, but makes yet another comment about how nice it is to see good parenting these days.

The lights still don’t change even though there is no traffic now. I look at the father. He continues to smirk.

Something snaps inside me and I just bolt across the road. I don’t look back and I don’t stop. I run all the way to the Barbican.

I feel a sense of achievement this evening as I have managed to upgrade this Wordpress blog without the whole thing falling over (as far as I can tell so far anyway). As someone who has a propensity to tinker with technical things without quite knowing what I’m doing, I am quite chuffed that this all went so smoothly. Paranoid as I am though, I am still am going to kindly ask that anyone who sees something looking seriously amiss to contact me.

Other highlights today included listening to Just a Minute on Radio 4 over a bowl of steaming porridge before a trip into town to buy the crucial elements for any Scottish / Australian household this time of year (haggis, vegemite and beer).

It’s the small things in life you know…

Last night I started my new Tai Chi class – new form, new night, new people.

I got there a bit early and was lingering in the corridor chatting to the other people in the class; they all knew each other but were friendly and welcoming towards the newbie. Throughout the chatter about tai chi, a guy in the corner is eyeing me off. Finally he edges his way over.

‘Good party on New Year’s Eve then?’ he says.
I am a bit taken back. I have never seen this man before in my life and this is not your usual conversation opener from a stranger.

‘I had a good New Year thanks, but sadly, I didn’t go to any parties’ I reply smiling.
‘Yes, you did.’ he says confidently ‘You were at a New Year’s Eve party in Cambridge’.
‘Er, no I wasn’t. You must have met my doppelganger that night!’

He is completely unconvinced and insists ‘No, you were back in Cambridge.’
‘No.’ I say firmly ‘I was definitely home in London. I haven’t been to Cambridge for a long time.’
‘Are you sure?’ he challenges.
‘Yes!’

He changes tact. ‘Have you got a boyfriend?’
‘Yes…’ I reply, wondering where this is going.
‘I know!’ he says triumphantly ‘He’s from Cambridge!’
Again, I have to let him down. ‘Well, actually he’s from Aberdeen – unless he’s been performing an elaborate ruse for the past seven years’.
 
He is undeterred. ‘But you’re from Cambridge aren’t you? When did you last go back home?’
I wonder if my Australian accent has suddenly disappeared for the evening. ‘I’m not from Cambridge’ I say, completely bemused by now.

‘But I know you’. He is absolutely perplexed.

To put him out of his misery, we eventually decide that we may have met on a tai chi course several years ago, and we head into the evening’s class.

Throughout the session though, out the corner of my eye, I keep seeing him glance at me. He looks suspicious, as though I am purposely misleading him about not being from Cambridge.

It’s that time of the year when everyone does their end of year list/retrospective thing looking at the best and worse of the year. I suspect that these lists are often intended to make the lister look really cool and on the case. I’m nowhere near cool or on the case but that’s not going to stop me…

THE CRUCIAL STUFF

Cocktails

The cocktail of choice this year, apart from the superlative martini, is the bitter (yet sweet) Negroni. That’s equal parts:

• Campari
• gin
• sweet vermouth

Ice. Stir. Bitter. Pink. Nice.

Records

Midlake have probably been my band of the year. The Trials of Von Occupanther was a fantastic album which although released in 2006, I only really got into this year.

I seemed to have missed the boat in 2007 in terms of live music. Last year was superb (Steve Reich, Konono No. 1, Amadou & Mariam, Nicole Willis, Teenage Fanclub doing Bandwagonesque) but little has cut it this year other than well, Midlake, Orchestra Baobob (at the Jazz Cafe last month) and The Bad Plus (at the ICA in July).

Staying on the stereo from this year:

• Japan’s super kick ass jazz group, Soil and Pimp Sessions (which was probably was the gig of the year, but I sadly missed it)
• Laura Nyro’s Eli and the Thirteenth Confession
• CSS’s Lets make love and listen to death from above 7″
• Art Blakey’s Mosaic
• East Kilbride’s finest, The Pearlfishers’ Up with the Larks
• The very best of ethiopiques – excellent compilation of 70s Ethiopian soul and jazz
• the Carousel soundtrack. Obviously.

EVERYTHING ELSE

Good things

• The excellent dream I had where I went drag car racing with Bill Wyman. We ran into Morrissey at the track and he bought me an icecream. A nice time was had by all.
• Getting sunburnt in Scotland.
• John Howard, former Prime Minister of Australia, losing his seat to Maxine McKew, pinko former ABC journalist. Poetic justice.
• The rise and rise of Charlie Brooker.
• Leo Hickman’s The Final Call: In Search of the True Cost of our Holidays - a really well researched and well written book about how tourism is destroying the world. Sadly, I read this whilst on holiday in France.
• The fact that I managed to start writing this blog after many years of procrastination.

Bad things

• 99.9% of all primetime TV output. Will we ever be free from reality TV?
• Richard Dawkins managing to put even me off aethism.
• BBC Radio London shunting Norman Jay’s excellent music programme to digital, only to replace it with Heckle and Jeckle style presenters and lazy talkback radio; something that there’s not nearly enough of on BBC Radio London…
• The number of people I keep encountering who hate current London mayor Ken Livingston so much, that they would seriously consider voting for professional buffoon Boris Johnson instead.
• Having to pretend to care about Madeleine McCann.

Merry Christmas everyone – see you on the other side.

My significant other has been at home coughing and spluttering all weekend. Obviously, being a selfish cow, my main concern is that I don’t get ill and thereby disrupt my own hectic social life. So, in response, I have been loading up on vitamin C but this comes with its own problems.

I used to think that taking vitamin C for colds was good for you. Then sometime during the Andrew Collins vs Ben Goldacre homeopathy wars I read an article claiming that scientifically speaking, vitamin C doesn’t do anything, it’s just psychological, a placebo (annoyingly I can’t find the actual reference to this article anywhere so hopefully I imagined it…).

In the olden days when I had a cold, I’d just innocently pop some vitamins thinking that I was somehow doing my body a favour. It worked and that was good enough for me. Or rather it used to be. Now it’s an issue:

The ‘I just want to get healthy’ me thinks ‘My throat feels a bit tight, maybe I have a cold coming on. I think I’ll take a vitamin C.‘

Cynical/rational me says sarcastically ‘Yeah, lets get some of those placebos in there, like that will work.‘

Healthy me tries to ignore this, but can’t help but secretly think ‘Good point. If it’s a placebo, perhaps there’s no point in taking it…’

‘Exactly’ says cynical me.

Healthy me remains positive: ‘But I could take it and it might have an effect. It’s worth trying at least and it did use to work.’

Cynical me responds: ‘Yeah, but its not going to now is it? It’s a placebo isn’t it you idiot? And now that you know that, of course it’s not going to fucking work.’

Healthy me quickly wacks down a tablet anyway but feels desperately guilty, like I’m wasting my own time.

I feel cheated of my placebos.

I’ve recently had a good moan on the main site about people talking and taking photos on camera phones at gigs (as has, I’m pleased to say, marmiteboy on his blog).

It seems that the Royal Festival Hall in London has come up with its own way of tackling this. OK, it is the Royal Festival Hall which, as a seated venue has its own set of rules and conventions, but before the Imagined Village gig this week (Martin and Eliza Carthy, Billy Bragg, Sheila Chandra et. al.) we were solemnly informed that taking photos was dangerous for the performers.

Members of the audience snickered at this extremism but we all obeyed. 

I wish making inane comments about the bass player’s hair was dangerous for the performers too.  

1. I put on a Digitalism 12″ the other day and didn’t realise for a good few minutes that it was on the wrong speed.
2. Ice has found its way into my martinis recently.
3. A brochure called Music & Memories, which offers such mail-order delights as Liberace boxsets, DVDs with titles like Irish Lighthouses: Folklore, History and Beauty! and Working with Tractors, as well as Dickie Valentine and Connie Francis CDs, has popped through the mailbox and I am loving it!
4. I can’t stop listening to bloody Whitney Houston.

Have been consumed this week by work on the main website. It is ridiculous how much time I have been spending in front of the computer screen and how addictive it is.

Actually my behaviour regarding cocktailandrecords.net for the past week (rushing home to be with it, eating tea with it, staying up late with it, furtively planning it during work hours) distinctively reminds me of earlier addictions to those classic Sierra computer games like SpaceQuest, PoliceQuest etc. etc. These, like rubbish romance novels and trashy ‘lifestyle’ magazines (ahh…Dolly magazine) formed a small and addictive, but necessary part of my early teenage years. You need to get it out of your system before moving on. Even if that’s moving on to a life of spending all of your time and money on proper things like music, film tickets and expensive bottles of spirits. So will my recent website addiction end up just going the way of my weekends with SpaceQuest? Well, only time will tell…

Until then, I’m off to the Jazz Cafe for some non-web related downtime with Nicola Conte.